Applications and services are often made available over the Internet or other networks. Content, application, and/or service providers often utilize remote computing services where remote computing is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services. Electronic resources include processors, memory, and, generally, any hardware used in a computing environment. Often hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. Users, for example, may rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to remote computing resources, and thus require ownership of less local hardware and/or software than would be required without remote computing services. In addition, often remote computing resources are shared such that, for instance, if one user is not using a processor, another user may.
Historically, users of computing resources have generally utilized local computing resources, that is, resources locally managed on or in connection with user devices, such as notebook and/or desktop computers. Common applications, such as word processing applications, for example, often execute locally on a user's computer, such as a work or home computer. As such, users (or organizations associated with the users) often pay for expensive hardware required for executing the applications and, if necessary, for the maintenance and upgrade of the hardware. Much of this hardware, however, often goes unused. A processor on a person's computer, for example, often operates minimally, if at all, while the user is not using the computer. Thus, remote computing services have the potential to provide more effective use of computing resources.